My advice to Junior Developers
Recently, I was in an interview to hire a junior developer position for our company and the candidate asked me a question:
What advice would you give to a junior developer given your experience?
This is a good question. It got me thinking about my own journey.
Not having a computer science background, I instead gain my experience mainly from the work I do. My first program was written in Visual Basic where most of the code was copied from a book I had read. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp the code I was writing, but I did know what needed to be accomplished. In the end, I was super excited to see the piece of code I had written in action. From there, I started to program for a living. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and still do. But there were certain things I wish I had known from the beginning.
Grasping programming fundamentals
Grasping fundamentals should always be the first step in learning programming. The better you understand them the easier it will become for you to learn the more advanced concepts later on. It will also help you work efficiently which will, in turn, allow you to solve a problem faster than those who don’t fully understand these fundamentals.
Technologies will come and go but the fundamentals you learn will stay relatively the same. My advice would be to spend time understanding these fundamentals before jumping into any new technology.
Focus on Depth
Learning new technologies can be fun. However, you don’t become an expert simply by having broad experience. Focus rather on the depth of your fundamental knowledge of programming basics and you’ll benefit greatly from it down the road.
I interviewed a few candidates for our company, who have experience with React. They either learned it from the coding bootcamp or they taught themselves. Yet they couldn’t even answer some basic Javascript questions: What are undeclared and undefined variables? Or what’s the difference between var and let?
Knowing how to build an app in React is cool but it will not earn you big bucks if you don’t know javascript well.
Understanding the code you are writing
Writing code doesn’t necessarily mean you understand it.
We’ve all copied code found online at some point but not understanding the code you are copying will hurt you eventually. For example, you could introduce a bug that you will need to fix later on. Or you might need to copy the same code again the next time when the same problem occurs thus duplicating the problem.
I’ve seen it in the past where the developer just copied the code from Stack Overflow — even keeping the same comments. Then a day after the code is deployed, something breaks on production that we have to fix right away.
In short, it’s ok to copy code if you understand it. If you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t commit your code.
Learn and get advice from seniors
I didn’t have the privilege to learn from senior developers earlier in my career. Throughout my journey, I have mostly worked as the sole developer on my teams, which has honed my ability to work independently. This experience has proven valuable as I can handle tasks effectively on my own.
However, there were certainly times when I got stuck with complex problems that left me feeling stuck and wished that there were senior developers who I could turn to for guidance. I am sure that their expertise and shared experiences could have offered me invaluable insights and assistance after long hours or days of struggling.
Conclusion
Learning programming is a long journey. Sometimes you will have to learn from your own mistakes. The key is don’t make the same mistake over and over again.
One last thing, being humble will go a long way toward your eventual success.
